Digital Smarts - Yik Yak App to Close

Yik Yak, the anonymous, location-based messaging app once popular with high school and college students, is shutting down at the end of this school year. The mobile app, which for a time allowed for anonymous messaging on school campuses, raised concerns about cyberbullying and was blamed for conveying numerous bomb and other threats that temporarily closed down many schools. Eventually, the unfiltered vulgarity and threats so prevalent on the site prompted the company to implement mandatory user names, much like Twitter. The lack of anonymity led many of the site's most ardent users to delete their accounts, seeing little use for a group messaging app when more established apps like Twitter or Snapchat offered the same functionality.